What is the benefit of creating a scriptable object?

It's for a specific problem. Don't bother with it now. It's just another place to add a script, and you already have plenty of other fine ways of doing that which are less complicated. When you get to multiple scenes and prefabs linked to other prefabs, there are a few cases where scriptableObjects look a tiny bit nicer. Just looks. They don't do anything you couldn't do before.

People claim scriptable object do all these cool things. But that's like having a bunch of hammers you use to make music. Then you get a red handled hammer and you're like "whoa -- red handles let you to attach pieces of wood together with a stiff wire."